She looked into his handsome face with genuine admiration. How bright the day was again! Earth, sky, air, grew lovelier in the light of her happiness; for in the love her brother bore to this girl she saw her own reflected. "She loves me as well as I love her, Lily." "I am sure of it--I am sure of it; she couldn't do otherwise. What is her name?" "Lizzie," answered Alfred, with gratified vanity. "Lizzie! Lizzie! I shall have a sister; I love her already, my dear. Of course," she said slyly, "you have her portrait?" "How do you know, you puss?" he asked, with a laugh and a blush. She echoed his laugh, and said, with an affectation of superior wisdom, "I could shut my eyes, and find it--there!" and she touched his breast-pocket lightly. "Here it is, Lil," he said, bashfully and proudly, taking Lizzie's portrait from his pocket. "What do you think of her? But it doesn't do her justice." The accumulative sins that photographers are guilty of in "not doing justice" must surely bring a heavy retribution upon them one of these days. But in this instance they found a zealous champion in Lily, who gazed at the portrait with admiring eyes, and kissed it again and again. "What a beautiful face! what lovely hair!" ("All her own, Lil," interpolated Alfred.) "I can tell that. And she has brown eyes, like mine. And your portrait is in this locket round her neck. When shall I see her really?" "Soon; I have told her about you. But O, Lily, I am so unhappy with it all! I am the most miserable wretch in the world, I do believe!" "Unhappy!" exclaimed Lily, bewildered by these alternations of feeling. "Miserable! I don't understand you, Alfred." Indeed, she could not understand it. She judged from her own feelings; to love and to be loved was, to her imagination, the highest condition of happiness. Earth contained no brighter lot; and if in the Heaven and future life we believe in and look forward to--all of us, I hope--some such bliss as the bliss of pure love is to be ours, there can be no better reward for living a good life. "You asked me to tell you my troubles," said Alfred, a little sulkily, "and I told you: money. But you seem to have forgotten it already." "I did, for a moment, my dear," she replied remorsefully; "I forgot it in my delight at the news you have told me for and in the contemplation of your happiness." "How can I be happy," he grumbled, "with such a trouble upon me? You do not know what it is, and how it weighs me down. How can I show my face to Lizzie when I am so pressed, and when I am in debt, and can't pay?" "And yet," she said, out of her own goodness and unselfishness, "you have brought me here for a holiday to-day, and I have been thoughtless enough to come, and put you to expense, when I ought to have guessed you could not afford it!" The very construction she placed upon it displayed him in a generous light which he so little deserved, that he felt inwardly ashamed of himself.